The present invention relates generally to the field of structured data documents and more particularly to a method of operating an extensible markup language (XML and derivatives) database.
Structured data documents such as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) documents and derivatives use tags to describe the data associated with the tags. This has an advantage over databases in that not all the fields are required to be predefined. XML is presently finding widespread interest for exchanging information between businesses. XML appears to provide an excellent solution for internet business to business applications. Unfortunately, XML documents require a lot of memory and therefore are time consuming and difficult to search.
Thus there exists a need for a method of operating an extensible markup language (XML derivatives) database that reduces the memory and speeds up the time to search structured data documents.